“Why were you driving to the Perry house four times a day the week before the Diamond Festival, Mr. Greene?”
“I don’t think it was that often,” Toby stuttered. “But as I told you, I was trying to see Charlie Perry. To find out what he’d done with my money.”
“Even after he went missing? You carried on, didn’t you? Your last visit was just before midnight on Sunday, the twenty-fifth. Just hours before Mr. Perry’s body was found.”
“No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have gone at that time of night. . . .” He dry-gulped.
“I see. We also know that you stopped calling his mobile on Sunday afternoon. Why was that, Mr. Greene?”
Toby tried to shrug but the tension in his body made his shoulders jerk as if he’d had an electric shock. “I gave up. It was obvious there was no point,” he croaked, and reached for the plastic cup of water in front of him.
“Why was it obvious? What made you so sure? Was it because you’d found him?”
“No,” he moaned to himself. “I can’t remember.”
DS Atkins produced a printout from her file. “Let me help you. We have data that shows your regular trips took a maximum of fifteen minutes door-to-door,” she said. “But you changed your routine on Sunday. You didn’t drive up to the caravan. You arrived at the car park near the Perry property at five ten on Sunday afternoon and stayed forty-two minutes before returning to the Lobster Shack. You made the same journey again at eleven fifty-four that night. This time you were recorded staying for thirty-one minutes.”
“Data? Recorded?” Toby looked dazed by the detail. “What do you mean?”
“CCTV—and there was a tracker app on your mobile phone,” Elise said.
“Saul.” Toby crumpled in front of them.
“What were you doing on those final visits, Toby?” Elise pushed a box of tissues over the table. “Who was driving the black SUV that arrived at the same time? And what did you do to Charlie?”
His whole body shuddered and Mr. Grimes laid his hand on Toby’s arm.
“I would like a moment with my client . . .” Grimes started, but Toby couldn’t be stopped.
“We didn’t kill him,” he said. “He was dead when we found him.”
“？‘We’？” But she knew. Her view of the High Street had occasionally been blocked out by his monster car.
“Me and Kevin.”
“Kevin?”
“Scott-Pennington. We’d both been conned.”
“Did Charlie Perry have a head injury when you found him?” Elise pressed on.
Toby closed his eyes.
Sixty-two
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Elise
What’s happening?” Elise said when Caro appeared at her office door. “What’s the news on Toby Greene?”
The restaurant owner had collapsed sobbing on the table after his admissions, and Mr. Grimes had insisted on a medical assessment of his client.
“He’s not up to any more questions at the moment,” he’d said firmly. “He’s getting chest pains. He’s going back to A and E.”
“Update in an hour,” Caro said. “No sign of Kevin Scott-Pennington’s body but the digital forensics team has found a cache of interesting images on his phone. He likes a bit of violent assault, our Kevin. He spent hours—and I mean hours—playing brutal video games.”
“There’s no law against it, unfortunately,” Elise said. “What about his calls and e-mails?”
“Regular calls to Charlie but the calls to Toby Greene start only on the Sunday. E-mails to Charlie got increasingly threatening and none were answered. It all matches with e-mails on Charlie’s laptop. We’ve cracked his main e-mail account but the techies are still working on passwords for some old ones. The latest e-mails in Kevin’s inbox are from a law firm saying he’s about to be sued for half a million pounds. That didn’t stop him spending, though. He was burning through his credit card.”
“So he was under huge pressure. People do stupid things when they are under that sort of strain. Sometimes terrible things.”
“But from what I hear, Toby Greene insists that Charlie was already dead when they found him,” Caro said. Elise could hear she was still sore at missing out on the interview yesterday.
“Look, I didn’t call you in because I didn’t want to eat any further into your family time,” Elise said quietly. “You and I will push Greene further on that when we get him back in. The data and CCTV show they’d been there earlier that day. Greene said they were looking for Charlie but didn’t find him. What if they were having their little talk about the money? Those sorts of conversations rarely go well, do they? What if they frightened him so badly on that first visit that he had a heart attack?”